I can smell the nurse from the other side of her desk, her perfume of dryer sheets and rubbing alcohol. She smiles at me, asking about my older brother who went pro in making himself throw up before his graduation. I shift in my seat, more uncomfortable than I’ve been in ages, worrying about the potential stain on the plastic chair beneath me. She chuckles, menacingly, and slides a two inch thick, white plastic packaged pad across the table to meet my eye. She then snaps her head in the direction of the bathroom within her office. I sprint.
A tear falls onto the brown tiled one-person bathroom floor. Simultaneously, two drops of blood. The room is whizzing around me as every atom in my body screams to not be in this situation, steadily becoming a bodily fluid based Medusa. The echo of “Oh my god, Robyn! Look what you were sitting on!” and the vision of two dozen 10-year-old heads spinning around to look at my sin, perpetually repeats in my head. I’m staring at myself in the mirror. I’m staring at the semi-opened pad I have balanced on the sink. I have no idea what to do with either.
I splash water on my face, slap myself twice, and unfold the pad. It’s a little over a foot long, almost the full length of my arm, and now any clue I had about where it was supposed to go had flushed down the drain. I let out a shallow cry.
There’s a knock on the door. “Everything alright in there?” the nurse asks. I quickly screech a positive response back, not wanting to bring anyone else into this. My face had been beet red since that fatal moment in 3rd-period math class. Another knock, “I have a pair of gym shorts you can borrow until your mom comes!” I open the door slightly, immediately smelling the dirty men’s shorts she has in her hands. I slam the door and shrink to the floor.
At several points in my middle school career, I had to revisit the dough-faced nurse’s office to ask for another forearm length pad after finding myself unfortunately unprepared in the face of a new process I had no idea I had. In sixth grade health, I was taught in a rapid-fire and strictly medical termed way about the fact that once a month I would feel as if my soul was leaving my body. I quit the swim team shortly after becoming a woman, due to a personal fatal diagnosis I made in response to my practically never-ending bleeding that no one explained was pretty normal.
In spring 2017, it was revealed that the Party Next Door won the student elections at Stony Brook, and free pads and tampons were coming to every bathroom campus-wide. I counted this as a personal win, completely caused by my crying on one of the candidates in Roth Cafe when he got me started on how expensive pads are on and off campus (the average woman spends $6500 for sanitary products in her lifetime!). However, the so-called “starting point” for this campaign for free feminine hygiene products is by distributing them only in the campus recreation center, and in the SAC on Wednesdays for a whopping two hours during campus lifetime. Both require students to ask for them at a desk, AKA, recreating the whirlwind of emotions that haunted 7th-12th grade whenever I had to go ask for a pad.
The campus recreation center is on the opposite side of campus from where I live, and I’m busy on Wednesdays. In addition to this, the idea of getting in line to approach a desk and ask the person on the other side to give me my allowance of necessary products is nauseating. While I’m incredibly grateful towards the efforts taken thus far, they are simply not enough. At what point are we going to treat the natural processes of female bodies as normal as sex, which the necessary protections are hanging in a bag on the door of every RA office on campus. An optional activity is better provided for than an unavoidable natural process that affects 60% of this campus’ population.
Until the proper information about female bodies and the proper supplies for them is distributed without the slight sense of embarrassment or scandal, the battle is not won. I don’t want an ancient pant leg sized pad or a stringless tampon released from a metal box that just ate every quarter in my backpack. I want action, and maybe a cute design on the package.
Gifs courtesy of PopKey